Even if you have never heard that song by Johnny Cash from the 1950s, I’m sure you can predict what will happen, just from reading the beginning words of the story.

Bill believes he has become a man and disregards his mother’s advice. He goes to town, drinks “his first strong liquor,” and when “a dusty cowpoke” laughs at him, he reaches for a gun in anger and loses his life.

I confess. I too have taken my guns to town. I have been self-assured, and I have reacted in anger instead of reason. The sign over the barroom door, in my metaphorical tale, is “Social Justice.” Among the people inside is a dusty cowpoke, a well-seasoned antagonist who also has guns at his side.

Social Justice? “Them’s fightin’ words."

My antagonist slams the modern social justice movement as simply “political correctness.” A “social justice warrior” is a pejorative term for a civil rights advocate who is only active online. The real meaning of “social justice” has been hijacked, and I am angry with every dusty cowpoke who laughs at my faith and my sincerity.

But with my guns left at home, I ask to be heard.

Catholic social teaching has always emphasized the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the afflicted, and so on. Social justice is distinct from mercy; it means achieving something more permanent than relieving immediate suffering. It may mean changing the system within which there is disparity, inequality, unfair treatment of some members of our common society.

Social justice is not socialism. It is not an economic or political theory, but an outlook that sees that human dignity derives its meaning from being made in God’s image (Gen. 1:26). No one is worth more than another. All are deserving of life and whatever is needed to adequately sustain it.

The term social justice can be found as far back as 1840, but it was defined by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. In his encyclical, Rerum Novarum, Leo expressed moral outrage at the disparity between “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.” Leo rejected socialism and upheld the right to private property. He insisted on the dignity of human work and the basic principle that people are more important than property and that everyone has a right to the basic necessities of life and a just wage. These are values for today as well.

I lean to the left, you might say, so I sought the thoughts of a conservative. Michael Novak, writing for Heritage Lectures in 2009, on “Social Justice: Not What You Think It Is,” concludes that social justice is “ideologically neutral,” common to people on the left and the right.

Novak says social justice is “a virtue, a habit that people internalize and learn.” It is a capacity “to organize with others to accomplish particular ends” and also to accomplish “the good of the neighborhood, or the village, or the town, or the state, or the country, or other parts of the world . . . .”

Social justice means to me that we work together for the good of every individual and for the common good. That we don’t come to town with minds made up, with party politics pre-determined, with guns at our side. Next time we meet, on Facebook or across the fence, in the newspaper or at the town hall, let’s keep our guns at home.